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In 2018, healthy meal kit service Sun Basket switched their recycled plastic box lining material to Sealed Air TempGuard, a liner made of recycled paper sandwiched between two sheets of kraft paper.Fully curbside recyclable, it reduces Sun Basket’s box size by about 25% and reduces the carbon footprint of shipping, not to mention the amount of plastic in transit, even when wet.Customers are happy.”Thank you to the packers for coming up with this concept,” one couple wrote.
It’s an admirable step toward sustainability, but the truth remains: The meal kit industry is one of many e-commerce industries that still relies on (frankly staggering amounts) plastic packaging—more than you bring home There is much more plastic packaging in grocery stores.Typically, you might buy a glass cumin jar that will last a few years.But in a meal pack, every teaspoon of spice and every piece of adobo sauce has its own plastic wrap, and every night you’re repeating the pile of plastic, you cook their prepackaged recipes.It’s impossible to miss.
Despite Sun Basket’s serious attempts to improve its environmental footprint, perishable food must still be transported in plastic bags.Sean Timberlake, senior content marketing manager at Sun Basket, told me via email: “Protein from outside suppliers, such as meat and fish, is already packaged from outside suppliers using polystyrene and polypropylene Layer combination.” “This is an industry standard material designed to ensure maximum food quality and safety.”
This reliance on plastic is not unique to transporting food.E-commerce retailers can easily offer cardboard boxes with recyclable content, FSC-certified tissue paper and soy inks that can be stuffed into recycling bins.They can tie reusable cloth tape or twine to their goodies and wrap glass or metal containers in mushroom-based packaging foam and starch-packed peanuts that melt in water.But even the most sustainability-conscious brands have one thing that continues to haunt us: LDPE #4 virgin plastic film bags, known in the industry as plastic bags.
I’m talking about the clear zip lock or branded plastic bag you’ll use for all of your online orders, everything from meal kits to fashion and toys and electronics.Although they’re made from the exact same material as plastic grocery shopping bags, plastic bags used for shipping haven’t been subject to the same widespread public scrutiny, nor are they subject to bans or taxes.But they are definitely a problem.
An estimated 165 billion packages were shipped in the U.S. in 2017, many of which contained plastic bags to protect clothing or electronic components or buffalo steaks.Or the package itself is a branded polyethylene shipping bag with a polyethylene dust bag inside.The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reports that U.S. residents use more than 380 billion plastic bags and wrappers each year.
It wouldn’t be a crisis if we did get our waste right, but a lot of this plastic — 8 million tons a year — goes into the ocean, and researchers aren’t sure when, or even if, it will actually biodegrade.It’s more likely that it just breaks down into smaller and smaller toxic fragments that are (albeit microscopic) increasingly difficult for us to ignore.In December, researchers found that 100 percent of baby turtles had plastic in their stomachs.Microplastics are found in tap water around the world, most sea salt, and – on the other side of the equation – human feces.
Plastic bags are technically recyclable (and therefore not on the “negative list” of Nestlé’s plan to phase out packaging materials), and many states now require grocery and convenience stores to provide customers with bins for recycling used plastic bags. But in In the United States, nothing can be recycled unless a business is willing to buy recyclable materials.Virgin plastic bags are very cheap at 1 cent a bag, and old (often contaminated) plastic bags are said to be worthless; they’re just thrown away.That was before China stopped accepting our recyclables in 2018.
The booming zero waste movement is a response to this crisis.Advocates strive to not send anything to landfill by buying less; recycle and compost where possible; carry reusable containers and utensils with you; and patronize businesses that offer free tiers.It can be very frustrating when one of these conscious consumers orders something from a so-called sustainable brand and receives it in a plastic bag.
“Just received your order and it was packaged in a plastic bag,” one commenter responded to Everlane’s Instagram post promoting its “no new plastic” guidelines.
Small changes can make a big difference, and we’re here to help.Introducing our new plastic-free guide.Want one?Download via the link in our bio and commit to #ReNewToday in the comments below.
In a 2017 survey by Packaging Digest and the Sustainable Packaging Alliance, packaging professionals and brand owners said the questions consumers asked them the most were a) why their packaging is not sustainable, and b) why their packaging is too many.
From my conversations with brands large and small, I’ve learned that most overseas consumer goods factories – and all apparel factories – from small sewing workshops to large factories with 6,000 people, pack their finished products in the plastic of their choice. in a plastic bag.Because if they don’t, the goods won’t get to you in the terms you asked for.
“What consumers don’t see is the flow of clothing through the supply chain,” said Dana Davis, vice president of sustainability, product and business strategy for fashion brand Mara Hoffman.Mara Hoffman apparel is produced in the United States, Peru, India and China.”When they’re done, they need to go to a trucker, a loading dock, another trucker, a container, and then a trucker. There’s no way to use something waterproof. The last thing someone wants is a batch that’s damaged and turned rubbish clothes.”
So if you didn’t receive a plastic bag when you bought it, it doesn’t mean it didn’t exist before, just that someone might have removed it before your shipment reached you.
Even Patagonia, a company known for its environmental concerns, has been selling clothing made from recycled plastic bottles since 1993, and its clothing is now individually packaged in plastic bags.Elissa Foster, Patagonia’s Senior Manager of Product Responsibility, has been grappling with this issue since before 2014, when she published the results of a Patagonia case study on plastic bags.(Spoiler alert: they are necessary.)
“We’re a fairly large company, and we have a complex conveyor belt system in our distribution center in Reno,” she said.”It’s really a roller coaster of product. They go up, they go down, they flatten, they do three-foot descents. We have to have something to protect the product.”
Plastic bags are really the best option for the job.They are lightweight, effective and inexpensive.Also (and you may find this surprising) plastic bags have lower GHG emissions than paper bags in life cycle analyses that measure the environmental impact of a product over its entire life cycle.But when you look at what happens when your packaging falls in the ocean – dead whale, suffocated turtle – well, plastic looks evil.
A final consideration for the ocean is paramount for United by Blue, an outdoor apparel and camping brand that promises to remove a pound of trash from oceans and waterways for every product sold.”It’s the industry standard to ship everything in plastic bags for quality control and pollution reduction, but it’s bad for the environment,” said Ethan Peck, Blue’s public relations assistant.They deal with this inconvenient fact by converting e-commerce orders from factory-standard plastic bags to kraft paper envelopes and boxes with 100% recyclable content before shipping to customers.
When United by Blue had their own distribution center in Philadelphia, they sent used plastic bags to TerraCycle, an all-inclusive mail-in recycling service.But when they moved deliveries to specialized third-party logistics services in Missouri, the distribution center didn’t follow their instructions, and customers started receiving plastic bags in packages.United by Blue had to apologize and hire additional personnel to oversee the shipping process.
Now, with the glut of used plastic bags in the U.S., waste management services that handle recycling in fulfillment centers are stockpiling plastic bags until they find someone who wants to buy them.
Patagonia’s own stores and wholesale partners take the products out of the plastic bags, pack them into shipping cartons, and ship them back to their Nevada distribution center, where they’re pressed into four-foot cube packs and shipped to The Trex, Nevada location, which turns them into recyclable decking and outdoor furniture.(It seems that Trex is the only U.S. business that really wants these things.)
But what about when you remove the plastic bag from your order?”Going directly to the customer, that’s the challenge,” Foster said.”That’s where we don’t know exactly what happened.”
Ideally, customers will bring the used e-commerce bags along with their bread and grocery bags to their local grocery store, where there is usually a collection point.In practice, they often try to cram them into plastic recycling bins, which damage the recycling plant’s machinery.
Rental brands with recycled clothing like ThredUp, For Days and Happy Ever Borrowed use reusable cloth packaging from companies like Returnity Innovations.But getting customers to voluntarily ship back used empty packaging for proper disposal has proven nearly impossible.
For all of the above reasons, when Hoffman decided four years ago to make her entire fashion collection sustainable, Davis, Mara Hoffman’s VP of sustainability, looked into compostable bags made from plant-based materials.The biggest challenge is that much of Mara Hoffman’s business is wholesale, and the big box retailers are very picky about packaging.If a branded product’s packaging doesn’t meet the retailer’s exact rules for labelling and sizing — which vary from retailer to retailer — the brand will charge a fee.
Mara Hoffman’s office volunteers at a composting center in New York City so they can spot any problems from the start.”When you use a compostable bag, you also have to consider all the components on the bag: ink – you have to print a choking warning in three languages ​​- it needs stickers or tape. The challenge of finding compostable glue is crazy!” She saw fruit stickers all over the fresh and beautiful dirt at a community composting center.”Imagine a big brand putting stickers on them, and the compost dirt is full of those stickers.”
For Mara Hoffman’s swimwear line, she found zippered compostable bags from an Israeli company called TIPA.The Composting Center has confirmed that the bags can actually be composted in the backyard, meaning if you put it in a compost pile, it will be gone in less than 180 days.But the minimum order was too high, so she emailed everyone in the industry she knew (including me) to ask if they knew of any brands that would be interested in ordering with them.With the help of the CFDA, a few other brands have joined the bags.Stella McCartney announced in 2017 that they would also be switching to TIPA’s compostable bags.
The bags have a one-year shelf life and are twice as expensive as plastic bags.”Cost has never been a factor holding us back. When we make this shift [to sustainability], we know we’re going to be hit,” Davis said.
If you ask consumers, half would tell you they would pay more for sustainable products, and half would also tell you that they check product packaging before buying to ensure brands are committed to generating positive social and environmental impact.Whether this is really true in practice is debatable.In the same sustainable packaging survey I mentioned earlier, respondents said they could not get consumers to pay a premium for sustainable packaging.
The team at Seed, a microbiome science company that sells a combination of probiotics and prebiotics, spent a year researching to find a sustainable bag that could send customers monthly refills.”Bacteria are very sensitive — to light, heat, oxygen…even tiny amounts of moisture can degrade,” co-founder Ara Katz told me via email.They settled on a shiny home compostable oxygen and moisture protection bag from Elevate, made from bio-based raw materials, in Green Cell Foam’s non-GMO American grown cornstarch foam-filled mail.”We paid a premium for packaging, but we were willing to make that sacrifice,” she said.She hopes other brands will adopt the packaging they pioneered.Happy customers have mentioned Seed’s sustainability to other consumer brands such as Warby Parker and Madewell, and they have contacted Seed for more information.
Patagonia focuses on bio-based or compostable bags, but their main problem is that both customers and employees tend to put compostable plastic products into regular plastic recycling.”By keeping all our bags the same, we don’t contaminate our waste stream,” Foster said.She points out that “oxo” packaging products that claim to be biodegradable simply break down into smaller and smaller pieces in the environment.”We don’t want to support those types of degradable bags.”
So they decided to use plastic bags made from recycled materials.”The way our system works is you have to scan the label with the barcode through the bag. So we have to work hard to make sure that a bag with 100% recyclable content is transparent.” (The more recyclable the bag has, the more milk it has. The more.) “We’ve tested all the bags to make sure they don’t have weird ingredients that could cause the product to discolor or tear.” She said the price wouldn’t be too high.They had to ask their 80+ factories — all of which make for multiple brands — to order these plastic bags specifically for them.
Beginning with the Spring 2019 collection, which hits stores and websites on February 1, all plastic bags will contain between 20% and 50% certified post-consumer recyclable content.Next year, they will be 100% post-consumer recycled content.
Unfortunately, this is not a solution for food companies.The FDA prohibits the use of plastic food packaging with recycled content unless companies have special permission.
The entire outdoor apparel industry, serving customers who are particularly concerned about plastic waste, has been experimenting with approaches.There are water-soluble bags, sugar cane bags, reusable mesh bags, and prAna even enables bagless shipping by rolling up garments and tying them with raffia tape.It’s worth noting, however, that none of these individual experiments have been conducted by several companies, so no panacea has yet been found.
Linda Mai Phung is a veteran French-Vietnamese sustainable fashion designer with a unique understanding of all the challenges inherent in eco-friendly packaging.She co-founded the ethical streetwear/bike brand Super Vision and is upstairs from a small ethical denim factory in Ho Chi Minh City called Evolution3 owned by her co-founder Marian von Rappard work in the office.The team at Evolution3 also acts as a middleman for mass-market brands looking to place orders with the Ho Chi Minh factory.In short, she was involved in the entire process from start to finish.
She is so keen on sustainable packaging that she ordered 10,000 (minimum) biodegradable shipping bags made from tapioca starch from fellow Vietnamese company Wave.Von Rappard spoke to the mass-market brands that Evolution3 worked with to try and convince them to work with them, but they declined.Cassava bags cost 11 cents per bag, compared to just a penny for regular plastic bags.
“Big brands tell us…they really need [pull-off] tape,” Phung said.Obviously, the extra step of folding the bag and pulling the biodegradable sticker from a piece of paper and putting it on top to close the bag is a huge waste of time when you’re talking about thousands of pieces.And the bag isn’t even fully sealed, so moisture could get in.When Phung asked Wave to develop a sealing tape, they said they couldn’t retrofit their manufacturing machines.
Phung knew they would never run out of the 10,000 Wave bags they ordered—they had a three-year shelf life.”We asked how we could make them last longer,” she said.”They said, ‘You can wrap them in plastic.’”
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